There are certain instances when you don’t need search engines to index certain pages on your blog.
A typical example is when you have a page that contain an already existing contents like the privacy policy page.
You may need to instruct the search engines not to index these pages to avoid the penalty of copied or duplicated content. You will achieve this with the help of “rel_noindex” tag.
Today, I will teach you the importance of Rel_Noindex tag and how to add Rel_Noindex tag on certain pages/posts on your blog.
As a blogger, one of the functionality you are expected to learn is how to add Rel_Noindex tag on certain pages/posts on your blog.
Rel_Noindex tag tells search engines like Google and Yahoo that the relevant page should not be indexed in their search results.
Read Also: How to Write About Me Page on Your Blog
Are you thinking what search engine indexing is? Well, search engine indexing is a process of search engine collecting and storing data for its use.
It is the search engine index that that actually provides the results for search queries because the pages that are stored within the search engine index often appear as search engine results page.
Now what this means is that the page will still be read by search engine but it won’t be indexed by it. This piece is a step-by-step process on how to add Rel_Noindex tag on certain pages/posts on your blog.
How to Add “Rel_Noindex” Tag on Certain Pages/Posts on Your Blog
To add Rel_Noindex tag on certain pages/posts on your blog, it is achieved in 2 ways:
If it is your first time of adding it, try a Rel_Noindex Specific posts and pages plugin at https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo and download it
After downloading the plugin, select the features you want and the pages you wish to install Rel_Noindex on
Select noindex, follow option If you don’t really know much about the plugin
It is important we note that Rel_Noindex works alongside NoFollow. If you don’t want search engines to follow certain pages on your blog, you can add a NoFollow tag to it, and it’s optional in the plugin. Now this is all there is for this plugin.
Read Also: How to Disable Copying Functionality on Your WordPress Blog
You can also use codes to add Rel_Noindex tag on certain pages/posts on your blog, especially if it is your second time. You can achieve this by adding it in the theme header.php and conditional check as shown below:
Also, applying it on a site URL:
www.infoguidenigeria.com/folder
Try it and confirm that it works perfectly.
To summarize this piece, we have to state note points; it is important you learn how to add Rel_Noindex tag on certain pages/posts on your blog so that you can stop search engines from indexing those posts and pages on your blog when the need arises, but I won’t recommend you choose NoFollow tags with it.
This is because if you add Rel_Noindex tag to your page and post without adding NoFollow tag, search engines will still follow all the links on your blog which is very important.
Also, the benefit of applying only Rel_Noindex tag without applying NoFollow tag is that Pagerank can flow through the Rel_Noindex and continue on the pages which are linked to it, but this can’t happen when you add NoFollow tag to it.
So, you can Rel_Noindex tags, category and archive using either of the two methods explained above to avoid post duplication issues and make quality pages part of the search.
